


Mildest Dreams

by KillClaudio



Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: 1960s, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Concerts, F/F, London, Post-Season/Series 06, Vignettes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:22:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24761515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KillClaudio/pseuds/KillClaudio
Summary: Moving to London isn't everything Joan thought it would be. Good thing Shirley's there to hold her hand.
Relationships: Joan Thursday/Shirley Trewlove
Comments: 10
Kudos: 8





	Mildest Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> I did my best with the historical research, but I'm afraid there are probably still huge holes. Feel free to point out any mistakes.

The first day of her new job, Joan went back to her room afterwards and cried for an hour. Everything was new and unfamiliar; her colleagues too busy to show her what to do; her flat in London small and damp and strange, her landlady grumpy; she had no-one to talk to. She lay awake at night, the ceaseless dull roar of the traffic echoing in her ears, and wondered if she'd ever sleep peacefully again.

Joan stuck it out until the end of the week, and then on Friday afternoon, she went to the nearest phone box and called Shirley. "Oh god," Shirley said, "I've had a terrible week too. Let's have a drink."

Joan had tentatively written to Shirley before she moved to London, unsure of her welcome. They had never been friends, exactly, just knew each other well enough to say hello in the shop or the bingo hall. But the letter she got in response had been warm and enthusiastic, and now Shirley waited for her on a sunny street corner with an equally sunny smile. She was holding a packet wrapped in newspaper and a small string bag. 

"Hello. I thought it was too nice a day to be stuck inside."

"Alright," Joan said. "Where are we going?"

They found a spot under one of the oak trees in Hyde Park, its green leaves just catching fire in orange and gold. Joan spread her coat out as a blanket and flopped down in the early evening sunshine.

The string bag had a bottle of wine and two plastic cups in it, and Shirley poured them each a generous glass and held hers up. "Cheers."

"Cheers." Joan knocked back half her cup, and the flood of warmth made her feel instantly better. "What's in the newspaper?"

It turned out to be fish and chips. Joan found she was ravenous, and ate half hers in one go while Shirley picked at her chips and laughed at her. 

"So," Joan finally said, when she'd taken the edge off her hunger and they were both on their second glass of wine, "how's Scotland Yard?"

"Oh, you know." Shirley shrugged. She picked a daisy from the grass and started plucking out its petals. "Lots of making tea and doing the typing. It's nice to be useful, but I was hoping for a bit more excitement."

"They treating you alright?" Joan asked, remembering her own run-in with Box.

"Men are the same everywhere, aren't they? There are decent sorts like Superintendent Bright and your father, and then there are idiots. Apparently it's tradition in the Met to rubberstamp new recruits on the backside, and they suggested – fair's fair – they should do the same to me."

"You didn't let them?"

"No, I did not. I told them if they were that desperate to see up a bird's skirt then there was a magic act at Wilton's that had doves in tutus."

Joan laughed. She drank the last of her wine and lay back, watching the sunlight filter through the leaves.

"They're looking for WPCs to go to undercover," Shirley said suddenly.

Joan turned to look at her. "They're never. You're not thinking of doing it?"

Shirley shrugged her shoulders. "Why not? It might be an adventure."

Joan couldn't even imagine the idea of going undercover; it sounded like something out of a spy novel. "You'll be murdered in a dark alley," she said without thinking, and then cringed to hear her mother speaking through her. 

Shirley laughed and flicked a chip at her. "Don't be absurd. Besides, I've done it before. Playing Morse's wife."

Joan rolled her eyes.

"How is Morse, anyway?"

"He's a prick," Joan said, and then when Shirley snorted with laughter and spilt wine over herself, she added, "I don't want to talk about it."

"Fair enough. Tell me about your new job, then. What's your boss like?"

"Competent. Brilliant. Terrifying. You should see her intimidating police officers and arguing with councillors."

"Are you enjoying it?"

Joan considered that. "I have absolutely no idea."

She told Shirley about the old job in Oxford; told her about night school and Viv Wall and fighting the police and councillors on all sides, about parents who'd been neglected themselves and needed a bit of help. Told her about Martyr's Field falling, and the tragedy and the mess and the sheer uncontrollable anger she'd felt afterwards, and how good it felt to do something important and worthwhile, and how hard it had been to leave. 

"But the old social worker came back from maternity leave and wanted her job back. And then this came up in London, and I thought – can't sit around waiting for my life to start."

"I'll drink to that." Shirley wiggled her glass. 

"But I can't do it. I'm messing it up." It felt good to say it out loud, a weight off her shoulders; but it hurt, too, as though saying it aloud made it real. 

Shirley tilted her head to one side, considering. "Why do you say that?"

"I don't know what I'm doing. I keep making stupid mistakes."

"I suppose everyone does, their first week. You're being too hard on yourself."

It sounded so eminently reasonable that Joan wanted to hit her. "But I can't make mistakes. I can't afford to." 

"Chin up. _Illegitimi non carborundum_ , and all that."

Joan gave her a blank look. 

"Don't let the bastards grind you down," Shirley translated. 

"Christ, is that what they teach you at those posh schools?"

"Absolutely not. They taught us to balance books on our heads and the correct way to address a bishop."

"You're joking."

"I wish. And thank you for the reminder that even making tea for a bunch of brainless louts at the Yard is better than being a trophy wife to some tedious old don." Shirley tipped the last of the bottle into both their cups. "Drink up. Some of the girls are going to the pictures later, if you want to come along."

Joan went home that night full of food and wine, and slept better than she had all week. When she woke up the next morning she found she had the energy to tackle work again. She got out the reports she'd sneaked out of the office and went through every page, stopping only for a sandwich and a glass of milk.

Monday morning Joan called every drug clinic in the city and egged, wheedled, pleaded and promised until finally she struck gold. She dropped the file on Pat Hillyard's desk with a satisfying thump. "I got Sylvie Pelham into the substance misuse place in Mile End. She's got an appointment next week."

Hillyard looked her up and down. "Good work, Thursday. Get your notebook and come with me to the station. This is your case, now."

That became the pattern of her weeks in London. She would throw herself into her work from Monday to Friday, and then every Friday afternoon Shirley would show up to make it all better. 

They went to pubs and clubs, to films and impromptu concerts. They went down the bingo on Friday nights and Shirley, who looked like an angel but had the luck of the devil, won ten pounds and bought all the drinks for a week until the money ran out.

When they had no money to go out they would sit in the park, and join the groups chatting and singing and playing guitar. Shirley brought her chess set one afternoon and tried to teach her how to play, but Joan had no patience with moves and strategy. She moved randomly and won by sheer fluke, and then crowed about it for weeks afterwards because it made Shirley laugh and elbow her.

Joan signed up for more night classes and Shirley started studying for her sergeant's exams. They took their books to the park in the sunshine, to cafes when it rained, and quizzed each other over tea, and Shirley would lean close to Joan over the steam and steal bits of her currant bun.

There were men in every bar and on every street corner, men who told them they were beautiful and offered to buy them drinks. Joan had no trouble ignoring them.

"Mating season," Shirley would say with a sardonic roll of her eyes, making Joan collapse into giggles. "Five minutes after meeting you they're in love and want to marry you, but what they really want is some girl who'll look pretty and have dinner on the table at seven every night. Can you imagine living that way?"

Most of the women Joan had ever known had lived that way, scrubbing their fingers red in hot water and harsh soap. Her parents had seemed happy enough, but— "No. I can't." 

There had been a time when it was always one boy after another. "A heart like a hotel," her mum used to say, and Joan couldn't bear to tell her that none of them ever touched her heart. Half of them were too timid, too afraid of her father to even kiss her goodnight. The other half tried to feel her up in the back of their Minis or Morris Minors, pawing at her with beer-scented breath in Joan's face. 

None of it was what she thought passion would feel like. 

Joan wouldn't have called it a crush, exactly. There were no fireworks or butterflies in her stomach. Only a sweet contentment that filled her every time she bumped her knee against Shirley's under the table, a confidence and a certainty in the world that she had only ever glimpsed. 

She couldn't help thinking about Shirley, couldn't help dreaming; and couldn't help worrying, because a two months after Joan moved to London, Shirley was seconded to C Division, also known as Clubs and Vice.

"There's a flood of new drugs coming into Soho," Shirley told her. "Apparently last week DCI Farnsworth's daughter was offered some on the street in broad daylight. CID are having a fit, and they're pulling in all the officers that Uniform can spare. I'm supposed to hang about in the clubs and look gullible and stupid until someone tries to sell me something."

"You'll have your work cut out, then," Joan said. "You never looked stupid or gullible in your life."

"I don't know. I think volunteering might have been a bit stupid. Oh, Lord." Shirley sank down in the chair and pushed her hair out of her eyes. "Joan, why did I ever sign up for this?"

"Adventure, I think it was you said." Joan opened Shirley's wardrobe and cast a critical eye over the contents. "And a chance to do something except make tea. Come on. Show me your most gullible dress."

Joan had spent a lifetime watching her mother wait for her father to come home. She knew nothing came of worrying. Still, Monday morning she couldn't resist sloping off during her lunch break and called Shirley's landlady from the phone box at the end of the road.

"Quiet as the proverbial," Shirley said when she came to the phone. She yawned massively. "I was bored most of the night. I'll tell you all about it on Saturday." 

As autumn faded into winter they spent more time indoors, huddling in cafes and pie shops while Shirley told her about the seedy clubs, the little packets passed around in the dark, and how strange it was to see the officers hanging around in tight shirts and flower prints instead of suits. 

"The men in the clubs office are alright. They know what they're about, anyway."

"I expect they have to, round here." Joan gestured to Soho around them. "In this den of vice and iniquity." 

Shirley laughed, as Joan had hoped she would. "God, and you should have seen some of the looks my dresses are getting. Six months out of fashion might as well be sixty years."

Joan finished the last of her tea. "Carnaby Street, then?"

"Carnaby Street."

In Oxford, Joan had been the best-dressed girl in town, hair carefully set and nail varnish matched to her sweaters. In London she felt like a provincial nobody, in her Woolworth dress while the other girls wore prints she'd never seen before and designers she'd never heard of. 

Shirley fit better, flicking through the racks of clothing like she'd been doing it her whole life and chattering about undercover work and how she'd never be able to hide a gun in one of these dresses. 

"A gun?" Joan asked. "They never let you have a gun."

"I've had firearms training, I know how to use one." Shirley made a face. "Sort of. At least, they let me have one during the Wessex bank incident – remember?"

Joan shuddered. "Don't remind me. Oh god, Shirley, you will be careful, won't you?"

"Aren't I always?" Shirley said with a teasing smile. "Oh, Joan, look at this one."

The dress was a deep, rich red, with little cap sleeves and a hem that would fall mid-thigh. Joan hardly had a chance to look at it before Shirley was holding it up against her, pulling her closer to the window to see. 

"That's just your colour. Try it on, go on."

In the cramped dressing room, Joan wiggled into the dress, careful of the delicate fabric.

Shirley slipped behind the curtain with her. "Here, let me zip you up." Warm fingers ghosted up Joan's back as the zip hooked in place, then Shirley's gentle hands were combing Joan's hair over her face and she was smiling over Joan's shoulder in the mirror. "You look like Jean Shrimpton."

She looked like a different person, like one of the girls who walked around the streets of Soho in their Mary Quant dresses, with the effortless confidence of a woman who's dressed exactly right and knows it. She looked like she belonged in London.

The price was eye-watering, the kind of thing that would have inspired her parents to exclamations of 'more money than sense', but Joan had been careful with her wages this month, and oh, she coveted it…

"Buy it," Shirley said, the devil on her shoulder with a smile to match. "Wear it next week. It will give you confidence."

Joan groaned. "Don't mention next week." 

The local authority had put in a care and placement order for Sylvie Pelham's daughter, and Pat's office had decided to fight it on the grounds that she had pulled herself together enough to be a fit parent. Someone needed to testify at the hearing. 

"You deserve to do it," Pat had said when the court dates were announced. "You've worked harder on this case than anyone." Joan wasn't sure if that was a reward or a punishment.

She'd been half out of her mind with nerves when she stood to give evidence in front of the judge, certain that she was going to bring up her breakfast, but all that happened was the judge nodded soberly and made notes as she spoke. "Thank you for your input, Miss Thursday," he said when they were finished.

Her input. Nobody had solicited Joan's opinion on anything more important than the colour of the curtains, but now suddenly her judgement could sway the court into reducing a criminal sentence, or keeping a child with their mother. It was terrifying. 

In March, Joan was sent to do a foster assessment, with no more ceremony from Pat than a shouted, "Thursday, get out to Walthamstow and talk to the Thompsons, will you?" as she was walking through the office.

"What, on my own?" Joan called after her, but Pat was already talking to someone else. 

So she'd gone to Walthamstow, to a terrace house scrubbed as painstakingly clean as her mother's front step on Coronation Day, and a deferential couple who poured her tea and fell over themselves to answer her questions. Joan wrote her report as honestly as she could, recommending them as future foster parents, and prayed to any deity who would listen that she was making the right choice. 

"Strange, isn't it?" Shirley agreed later as they sat under the cherry trees, blossom shaking out with every breeze and showering them. "Half the time I'm furious that I can't get anyone to take me seriously, and then when they do—"

"I expect we'll get used to it," Joan said, expecting no such thing, but even as she said it she remembered her first day with Viv Wall and how the things that seemed impossible then would feel like child's play now. "Can't feel this way forever, can we?"

After a little while London no longer seemed the vast and frightening unknown that it had first appeared. She started to dress more like a Londoner, started to sympathise with the eternal London frustrations of people walking too slowly and buses that all came at once. Like natives, she and Shirley prided themselves on their indifference to fame. One sunny afternoon poking around Camden's record shops they walked right past John McVie, and ignored him completely in favour of a deep discussion of the Kinks' latest album. They ruined it as soon as they got round the corner by grabbing each other and squealing, and then Joan dragged Shirley back so they could peep around the building and gawk and laugh. 

In May the clubs boys finally caught their errant drug dealers, and Shirley got the chance to hold up another criminal at gunpoint. She came to the park the next day flushed with triumph and whirled Joan around, laughing, before hauling her off to the pub. 

Working undercover had given Shirley an in-depth knowledge of underground Soho that was frankly terrifying, and an urge to share it with Joan. They went to dive bars and shebeens, to parties in old warehouses and festivals on demolition sites. Joan found it strange to see Shirley, with her blonde hair and perfect enunciation and Head Girl manners, hanging about in the barely contained riot of the clubs with men in eyeliner and women kissing other women. It made it even more tempting to sidle up to her and tug at her ponytail, to ruffle her, to touch. 

"Far cry from Oxford, isn't it?" Shirley said once, 

"Yes." Joan looked around her at the whirl of dancing bodies. "Far cry."

She felt like a butterfly half-emerged from the chrysalis; no longer part of the world her parents knew, but also not yet part of the great seething city she was coming to love. The only way to go was forward. 

Their exams were set for the middle of June, and both would find out their results on the 26th. It felt like fate.

Friday afternoon, Shirley was standing at their usual corner near the park, and when she saw Joan coming she started jumping up and down and waving her paper in the air. "I got it! I did it! I'm a sergeant!"

Joan whooped and crashed into her, knocking them both a few steps along the pavement with her exuberant hug. "Me too! I passed, I got my license—oh my God, can you believe it?"

They stopped at the fish and chip shop, then ambled down the street together arm in arm, letting out the stress and tension of the last few months in laughter and teasing and stealing each other's chips. Shirley was warm where she was pressed to Joan's side, and every time they dodged people on the pavement she pulled Joan in tighter.

They waved to a few people as they passed, but no one stopped to chat; there was less of the usual strolling and more of a purposeful step, and Joan watched in surprise as first one acquaintance and then two disappeared down the end of the street. 

"Where are they all going?"

"There's an illegal concert tonight."

"Illegal?"

"They don't have a license, so they're just holding it in the cellar underneath Cobb's Brewery and only letting in people with the password. I think they're hoping uniform will turn a blind eye."

"Do you know the password?"

Shirley bit her lip. "I might. Do you want to get into trouble?"

Joan had _always_ wanted to get into trouble. The best she'd ever managed was a dingy flat and a man who wouldn't be seen with her in public. "Lead the way."

They sneaked down the alley, laughing and shushing each other, looking for the hidden door at the back of the brewery that led down to the cellar. At the bottom of a set of narrow steps was a bouncer, who held the door open for them when Shirley diffidently offered the password, and then there was an enormous cellar with vaulted brick ceilings, hot with the press of bodies and echoing with the sound of psychedelic rock. 

They got a drink from the makeshift bar set up at the back. Joan laughed at the face Shirley pulled when she took a sip. "Don't tell me you've never had moonshine?"

"Not like that," Shirley said with a cough. She took a deep breath, then tipped half of it back at once. "I love it, let's have another one."

Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes sparkling in the low light. Joan beamed at her. "Do you want to dance?"

They barely got out onto the dance floor when the song came to an end with one last screech of guitars and the lead singer yelled into the microphone, "Are you having fun?"

The crowd roared its excitement, screaming for louder, longer, more, more, more, and Shirley was shouting with them, lit with delight, smile splitting her face, and joyously, gloriously alive. 

There it was. Passion. 

Joan reached out and caught Shirley's hand before she was even aware she'd done it, tugged her backwards towards the wall, into a dark corner. "What—?" Shirley asked as Joan's back hit the bricks, but she fell into the circle of Joan's arms as easy as breathing, wrapped cool fingers around Joan's trembling ones. "Joan, are you—?" Shirley whispered, and then they were kissing, the answer to the question neither had dared ask, kissing in fierce, passionate silence, freed by the club and the music and the dark, and Joan never wanted to stop. 

The walk back to Joan's flat was wonderful and awful, nerves knotting Joan's stomach even as hope clawed in her heart. And then the door was shut and locked behind them, and as Shirley stepped back into her arms that same feeling of sweet contentment came over Joan, the rightness and the certainty of it.

Afterwards they lay together in the soft night breeze, as the soothing roar of London came through the open window. Joan could feel the future taking shape in her head; could picture the day she would be the one giving orders and training new social workers. Suddenly it didn't seem so out of reach. Because this, too, had been beyond imagination, until Shirley had kissed her and brought the future to life. 

"Shirl?" she said quietly, and poked her. 

"Hmm?" Shirley's voice was sleepy, but her hand never stopped stroking Joan's hair. "What is it?"

"Want to save the world with me?"

Shirley made a noise that might have been a laugh and might have been a complaint. "Can it wait until tomorrow?"

"Alright." A huge wave of happiness washed through Joan. "Tomorrow."


End file.
